What is the strategy?

During the semester, notecards were used to foster student engagement in several ways.  In general, five strategies were used: (1) Randomly calling students and asking questions (about 20 cards drawn per class), (2) assigning students to bring questions to the following class meeting (this method was used about three times during the semester, names were randomly drawn before class and the list displayed on the overhead), (3) giving students the option to be asked a question or to ask the professor a question during the current lecture (this depended on the lecture topic and the level of discourse in the class session; this strategy was mixed with the first method of randomly calling students), (4) during peer discussions, students were told to discuss lecture content or solve problems with their peers (these discussions would take about 5 min. from initiation to students reporting out); the student whose card was drawn was the reporter who explained the small group dialogue (typically 3 cards were drawn, to hear report-outs from 3 groups), and (5) using a similar strategy as 4, except the peer discussion was centered on the class solving iclicker questions from chapter study guides.

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